Page 84 of Levi

Levi: sounds right.

Two words, two hours. I tell myself it’s late and he’s tired, and I mostly believe it.

Friday, Jonathan calls before eight. His client’s stalling on the second look, and Jonathan and I both know what the stall is, because we’ve both run it. It isn’t cold feet. He’s walked that house twice himself, and she came off her first tour saying “very close,” which from a woman who views nothing that needs explaining is practically a ring on it. She’s already hung her clothes in those closets.

The delay is the play — hold the walkthrough hostage, let the seller sweat a silent weekend, then come in under ask while everybody’s relieved she came back at all. Jonathan would never say the word negotiation out loud; his people don’t. He says “she’s in no hurry, son,” in a drawl that means bring your seller a number conversation, and we understand each other completely. So there’s no showing this weekend. There’s a price dance, and the first rule of the dance is you don’t look eager. I can do that better than anyone on this coast.

Which changes the errand. The house still needs its ten minutes of my time — the air handlers, the humidity meter — but now there’s news worth carrying, and the news is for Levi. Don’t worry about anyone walking through this weekend.

I’ve got a window between a noon client and calls I need to make later, and I point it at the beach. At the light on 30A I pull up his text thread — call first if you head this way, I need to straighten up the place — and my thumb hovers over it, and I put the phone back in the cup holder, because the only reason he gave me for the warning is the one I’m driving out there to cancel.

There’s nothing to straighten up for. Ten minutes, the good news, gone.

The other reason I don’t text, the one I don’t let finish before the light turns green, is that it’s been five days, and news that fits in one line is a poor excuse to knock on a man’s door.

It’s also the only excuse I’ve got, and I’m not risking a don’t bother by sending it ahead of me.

I hit the gate code and park in the empty drive, same as all week. I’m already running the rest of the day in my head.

Side door, lockbox. I let myself in.

And I walk straight into it.

There’s a man I’ve never seen standing in the middle of the house. Suit, no tie, fifties maybe, soft in the middle. The kind of soft that spent its career behind a desk making other people do the lifting. He’s leaning over the couch.

No, he’s leaning over Levi, who sits on the edge of it with his shoulders gone in, hands flat on his knees, head down. Taking it. Small. The exact size I’ve watched him shrink into all week without once seeing what causes it.

And here’s the cause. A man standing over him, screaming into the top of his bowed head.

For half a breath the picture won’t focus. Levi’s face is wrong. The beard gone, the jaw bare, the hair cut to someone else’s idea of him. A stranger wearing his eyes. Then the man’s screaming rolls over the thought and drowns it.

“— everywhere, do you understand me, it is everywhere, every phone in this country, do you have the first idea what you’ve done —” The suit has a phone in his fist, shaking it at Levi’s lowered head. “Years. Years of work and you hand it away for — what, a bonfire? You think I can put this back in the —”

One second I’m in the doorway. The next I’m across the room with no floor in between. What comes out of me isn’t words at first. It’s a roar, a sound I didn’t know I kept anywhere.

“Get the fuck off him!” I’ve got a fist in his shirt and I haul him away from Levi. He comes off weightless. I run him backward into the wall by the window, hard enough that a lamp goes over somewhere and the phone jumps out of his fist. My face is in his face.

“Don’t you touch him. You don’t — who the hell do you think you are?” None of it sounds like me. The rage gets to the end of the English before I do, and what comes out the far side isn’t English at all. “Hijo de puta.” It comes out in my father’s voice. Thirty years of Coral Gables gone in one sentence, and Hialeah standing there in its place.

He’s pinned and I’m shaking with fury, with how much of me wants to hit him. My arm has gone tight with it.

Then the other part of me catches up. There’s a wall under this man’s spine and my hand twisted in his collar, and there’s a problem with that.

A legal charge.

A charge takes my real estate license. It takes the listing, the name on the sign, every clean thing I ever built. It doesn’t take my mother’s table — nothing takes that — but it takes the businessman I’ve been bringing to it. If I do what I want to do, I don’t get to keep being the man I’ve worked so hard to become.

My father worked two jobs for decades to carry us out of Hialeah and into Coral Gables, and nobody swings that away in one afternoon. The kid from Hialeah wants to swing. The man I made knows exactly what swinging costs me.

The two of them lock up against each other with the suit hanging between us, and I hold there, breathing like a bull.

Not hitting him. Not letting him go.

The guy in the suit isn’t scared. That nearly tips it. He’s outraged. Gone red, sputtering. He can’t compute this is happening to him.

“Get your hands — do you have any idea —” He twists, gets a look at me, head to foot, and his lip curls at what he finds. “What are you? A fanboy?”

I don’t know what he means. Fanboy of what? A soft, rich prick who thinks the world should know his face, sneering at the local who dared put a hand on him. My arm presses a half-inch harder into his chest.